I tried searching on here before posting, but I couldn't find anything.

I'm fairly new to knitting, and I'm trying to figure out the magic loop for a hat I am working on. I keep ending up with what looks like a dropped stitch/extra stitch/I'm not quite sure! I know for sure it's something extra... in the example in this picture, I had 22 stitches, and then I had 23, including the oddball, after I did a round.

Any help is greatly appreciated... I've done a bunch of tests trying to figure out where this is coming from, but I still can't figure it out!

It does look like you have a yarn over. Is it from where you divide the stitches to make a loop? I sometimes have the yarn over the needle and don't notice till the next time I come to it...or I've knit it and have an extra stitch.

__________________~ GG

Cheating is an option. . . . Cheaters never win and winners never cheat, but smart knitters who want to retain an iota of sanity do, cheerfully. ~~Kory Stamper

Could be an accidental YO (yarn over) or what happens to me sometimes is I find that if I'm chatting with a group I don't watch as closely and sometimes the left needle pokes through the edge so it almost looks like a stitch. I usually catch it, but I have knit it.

__________________
Jan

When asking questions ALWAYS post the name and a link for the pattern if you have it.

Try to watch each stitch and see if you can tell when you're doing this yarn over. When you come to the current one on the next row, you can just drop it off the needle. The little extra yarn will work it's way into the stitches on either side as you continue to knit and any hole will disappear..

Looks like a YO to me too. They're not hard to do by accident in ML, especially where the stitches are divided. When I was learning ML, I had an awful time trying to remember where the yarn was supposed to be and made more than a few Frankenstitches. Once I got used to making sure the working yarn was behind everything, it quit being so much of a problem. Another thing to watch is to make sure that you don't get things twisted in the first couple of rounds. It's easy to do, especially if you have a small number of stitches. Don't know if it would cause this particular "feature" or not, but it sure can make a mess.